Tuesday, December 27, 2005
This Day in Ancient History
On this day in 537 AD, Patriarch Menas of Constantinople consecrated the architectural masterpiece Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), a church built at incredible expense by the Emperor Justinian. It became a mosque following the conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman Turks in 1453. In 1934, Kemal Ataturk secularized the site and it is now the Ayasofya Museum. Some might see a lesson in that turn of events.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 7:43 AM 
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The current Hagia Sophia has been rebuilt several times, and was (if Wikipedia is correct) the third church on that site. The first was built in the 4th century, the second was built by Constantius and burned down in the Nika riots of 532 AD.
The main dome seems to have collapsed in 558, 563, 939, and 1346. It was taken down and rebuilt by the Ottomans in the 16th century.
If I recall my Norwich* correctly, each of the collapses was taken as a bad omen by the citizens of The City.
* John Julius Norwich has written a couple of excellent histories of the Byzantine Empire: "A Short History of Byzantium" and a three-volume history (Byzantium: The Early Centuries, Byzantium: The Apogee, and Byzantium: The Decline and Fall). The latter is brilliant, but its 1200 pages is still only enough for a quick overview of the Empire.
The main dome seems to have collapsed in 558, 563, 939, and 1346. It was taken down and rebuilt by the Ottomans in the 16th century.
If I recall my Norwich* correctly, each of the collapses was taken as a bad omen by the citizens of The City.
* John Julius Norwich has written a couple of excellent histories of the Byzantine Empire: "A Short History of Byzantium" and a three-volume history (Byzantium: The Early Centuries, Byzantium: The Apogee, and Byzantium: The Decline and Fall). The latter is brilliant, but its 1200 pages is still only enough for a quick overview of the Empire.
Thanks for showing the shortcomings of my historical paragraph. I see I was hawking the one built after the Nika riots but before the first main dome collapse in 558. Rebuilding the collapsed dome is not exactly rebuilding the whole church, un, mosque, uh, museum, but it would have been better to include the more complete history. Thanks again.
Sorry, I didn't mean that as a correction, but rather as an expansion. I find Byzantine history fascinating, and the Hagia Sophia a really interesting part of that history. I think it's especially interesting that the Ottomans didn't destroy the church. In this, it has some parallels to mosques in Sicily that were repurposed as Christian churches by the Normans.
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